by Marie Arana
“For the Americans of the north, the only Americans are themselves”: Epistolario de Diego Portales (Santiago: Ediciones Universidad Diego Portales, 2007), 1:8.
forced Indians to buy goods they didn’t need: Miller, Memoirs, 1:12.
40 percent of all US exports: Shlomo Ben-Ami, “Is the US Losing Latin America?” Project Syndicate, last modified June 5, 2013.
It is a market that generates: US Chamber of Commerce, “The Facts on Nafta,” December 16, 2016, www.uschamber.com/sites/default/files/the_facts_on_nafta_-_2017.pdf.
Chile’s threat to nationalize Anaconda: “CIA Activities in Chile,” US Central Intelligence Agency online, last modified September 18, 2000.
facing resistance by Colombian workers: Dan Kovalik, “Colombia: The Empire Strikes Back,” The Blog, Huffington Post, last modified May 8, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-kovalik/colombia-the-empire-strik_b_1500062.html.
“brigade commanders with hands-on counterinsurgency”: “Obama Says ‘Days of Meddling’ in Latin America Are Past,” BBC News online, last modified April 11, 2015,; Kovalik, “Colombia.”
“to do more to combat drug use on its own turf”: Ben-Ami, “Is the US Losing?”
“The days in which our agenda in this hemisphere”: “Obama Says.”
even though China is the world’s number one producer of iron: www.worldatlas.com/articles/top-iron-ore-producing-countries-in-the-world.html.
and even though Brazil loses money in the bargain: Kenneth Rapoza, “Brazil’s Vale Needs to Turn Its Iron Ore into Pixie Dust,” Forbes, February 4, 2016.
Peru may be one of the world’s top ten producers of gold: “Top 10 Gold-Producing Countries in the World,” FinancesOnline, accessed March 15, 2019.
They are owned, managed, and operated by: Peru’s Mining & Metals Investment Guide, 2017/2018 (Lima: EY Peru, 2018), 31.
Asia now consumes most of the gold: More than 40 percent, to be precise. Heather Long, “China Is on a Massive Gold Buying Spree,” CNN Money Investing Guide online, last modified February 10, 2016.
for every $100 of gold it rips: President Danilo Medina Sánchez, quoted in “Sickness and Wealth: Shiny New Mine, Rusty Pollution Problems,” Economist online, last modified September 21, 2013.
“That is simply unacceptable”: Ibid.
the fact that almost half of Colombia is managed: PBI Colombia, no. 18, November 2011.
Mexican mines are dominated by Canadians: “Mexican Mining,” Engineering and Mining Journal 212, no. 8 (October 2011): 52; Mining Industry in Mexico (Vancouver: Deloitte & Touche LLP, May 2012).
For every simple gold ring that goes out into the world: Arana, “Dreaming of El Dorado”; “The Real Price of Gold,” National Geographic, January 2009. More than a pound of mercury, OIT/IPEC report, http://geco.mineroartesanal.com/tiki-download_wiki_attachment.php?attId=122, 5. Newmont moves thirty tons of rock for every ounce of gold. “By the time it is through, the company will have dug up billions of tons of earth.” Jane Perlez and Lowell Bergman, “Tangled Strands in Fight over Peru Gold Mine,” New York Times online, June 14, 2010.
Epigraph; “Gold is chemically inert”: Bernstein, 3.
One ounce of gold, which sold on the global market for $271: A graph of gold prices at past and current rates can be found on Gold Price, www.goldprice.org.
The largest gold operation in all South America: José Ramos, “La mineria peruana, la Newmont-Yanacocha y el Proyecto Conga,” Globedia, last modified July 7, 2012, http://globedia.com/mineria-peruana-newmont-yanacocha-proyecto-conga; Francesc Relea, “Peru’s Humala Shuffles Cabinet,” El País (Madrid) online, last modified July 26, 2012, http://elpais.com/elpais/2012/07/26/inenglish/1343304801_310180.html.
Their complaints were loud and clear: Polya Lesova, “Peru Gold, Copper Mining Opposition Intensifies,” MarketWatch, last modified July 25, 2012.
Not long before, a German scientist had confirmed: Reinhard Seifert, quoted in Alice Bernard and Diego Cupolo, “Scientist Calls Peru Conga Mining Project an ‘Environmental Disaster’: Interview with Reinhard Seifert,” Upside Down World, last modified May 1, 2012, http://upsidedownworld.org/main/peru-archives-76/3608-scientist-calls-peru-conga-mining-project-an-environmental-disaster-interview-with-reinhard-seifert.
the question of rank exploitation: In 2010, a year in which the Yanacocha mines shipped $3.7 billion (3 million ounces at $1,290 an ounce) worth of gold from Cajamarca, more than half the residents of Cajamarca earned approximately $100 a month. Perlez and Bergman, “Tangled Strands”; Ben Hallman and Roxana Olivera, “Gold Rush,” Huffington Post, last modified April 15, 2015; Apoyo Consultorio, Study of the Yanacocha Mine’s Economic Impacts: Final Report (Lima: International Finance Corporation, September 2009), www.ifc.org/wps/wcm/connect/3853268048f9cc368651ee28c8cbc78b/Yanachocha-Peru.pdf?MOD=AJPERES.
Peru stood to retain only 15 percent: This is a generous reckoning. Some reports show gold sales in 2013 of $1.43 billion and a Peruvian tax of $137.8 million, which represents less than 10 percent retention by the state. Raúl Wiener and Juan Torres, The Yanacocha Case (Loreto, Peru: Impresión Arte, 2014), 47–58, https://justice-project.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/the-yanacocha-taxes-2015.pdf.
troops in riot gear were called out to contain: There has been no dearth of antimining protests in Peru or anywhere else in South America, with 215 recorded in 19 countries in 2014. “Mining in Latin America: From Conflict to Cooperation,” Economist online, February 6, 2016.
leader of the protest, a Catholic priest, was taken by force: The priest was Marco Arana (no relation to this author), now a Peruvian congressman. “Agresión a Sacerdote Marco Arana 04 Julio 2012,” uploaded to YouTube by Cajamarcaenvideo on July 4, 2012, 3:33, www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-amfIQn0OU).
The diminutive Peruvian invited protesters onto her contested land: For a testimonial video by Acuña and live documentary evidence of the attacks on her and her family, see Roxana Olivera, “Life Yes, Gold No!” New Internationalist, last modified November 21, 2012, https://newint.org/features/web-exclusive/2012/11/21/peru-gold-rush-threatens-indigenous-communities. See also “Máxima Acuña, la campesina peruana ‘heredera’ de la activista asesinada Berta Cáceres” [Máxima Acuña, the Peruvian peasant ‘heir’ of the murdered activist Berta Cáceres], BBC News Mundo, last modified April 18, 2016, www.bbc.com/mundo/noticias/2016/04/160418_peru_campesina_maxima_acuna_gana_premio_goldman_heredera_berta_caceres_lv.
to walk away from the project: Cecilia Jamasmie, “Community Opposition Forces Newmont to Abandon Conga Project in Peru,” Mining.com, last modified April 18, 2016, www.mining.com.
Máxima Acuña was given a prestigious international prize: “Máxima Acuña, 2016 Goldman Environmental Prize Recipient, South and Central America,” Goldman Environmental Prize online, accessed January 31, 2019, www.goldmanprize.org/recipient/maxima-acuna.
a New York journalist dubbed her “the badass grandma”: Anna Lekas Miller, “Meet the Badass Grandma Standing Up to Big Mining,” Daily Beast, last modified April 18, 2016.
promising sales of nearly $1 billion a year: “Newmont Announces Full Year and Fourth Quarter 2016 Results,” Business Wire, last modified February 21, 2017, www.businesswire.com/news/home/20170221006614/en/Newmont-Announces-Full-Year-Fourth-Quarter-2016.
A few months later, a band of hit men: Michael Brune, “Goldman Prize Winner Reportedly Attacked at Her Home by Mining Industry Hitmen,” Eco Watch, last modified September 23, 2016.
Epigraph; “We would not say Jesus, Mary, Joseph”: A female miner, quoted in Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980), 148.
Leonor Gonzáles could be Máxima Acuña’s sister: To remind: this section on the Ochochoque-Gonzáles family (as all material about them) is taken from a series of more than two dozen interviews and hundreds of Internet communications the author conducted with family members between January 2012 and April 2019 in La Rinconada, Putina, Juliaca, Puno, and Lima.
some nations win, others lose: Galeano, 1–2.
the most unequal continent in the world: Acemoglu and Robinson, 19.
Latin American elites adopted policies and institutions: Ibid., 67.
by 1914, there were almost thirty thousand banks: Ibid., 33–34.
Latin American republics became extractive by nature: Ibid., 81.
Those who had served his revolution had ploughed the sea: Simón Bolívar to Barranquilla Flores, 9 November 1830, in Cartas del Libertador corregidas conforme a los originales [Letters from the liberator conforming to the originals], ed. Vicente Lecuna, 10 vols. (Caracas, 1917), 9:370. See also Arana, Bolívar, 450.
The strongest, as always in these Americas, did as they pleased: Serge Gruzinski, Man-Gods in the Mexican Highland (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989), 41.
“Mining is the hole through which the vitality”: Sergio Almaraz Paz, Bolivia: Requiem para una República (Montevideo, Bolivia: Biblioteca de Marcha, 1970), 83–84.
“Of all those expensive and uncertain projects”: Adam Smith, in Samuel D. Horton, The Parity of Money as Regarded by Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Mill (London: Macmillan, 1888), 79–80.
Epigraph; “National wealth consists in the abundance”: Ibid., 15.
the vast majority of Latin Americans: Jamele Rigolini and Renos Vakis, “Four Facts About Poverty in Latin America You Probably Didn’t Know,” Huffington Post, The Blog, last modified December 6, 2017.
Whereas open frontiers in the United States of America or trade routes in Europe: Acemoglu and Robinson, 36.
That extractive economy has been inimical to true prosperity: Ibid., 37.
Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, and Colombia have seen: George Gao, “Latin America’s Middle Class Grows, but in Some Regions More Than Others,” FactTank, Pew Research Center online, last modified July 20, 2015.
PART 2: SWORD
Epigraph; “The distant past never disappears completely”: Octavio Paz, El Laberinto de la soledad (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), 13–14. In the original: “Las épocas viejas nunca desaparecen completamente y todas las heridas, aún la más antiguas, manan sangre todavía.”
CHAPTER 6: BLOOD LUST
Epigraph; “Question: When did Peru fuck up, exactly?”: “Cuando se jodió el Perú?,” Mario Vargas Llosa, Conversación en La Catedral. Answered by Jeremías Gamboa: “El Perú se jodió al momento mismo de nacer. Su concepción tuvo como base un hecho asimétrico y brutal que fundó una nación herida y enemistada con una de sus mitades, la indígena.” Gamboa, “En que momento se jodió el Perú? El dilema vargallosiano,” El Comercio (Lima), March 29, 2017.
He came barefoot to this country from Cuba: Based on numerous interviews conducted from September 1995 through June 1996, and intermittent telephone communications thereafter with Carlos Buergos, inmate, Lorton Prison, VA.
Seared into the memory of every Marielito: Much of the following account about Marielitos and Carlos Buergos is taken from Marie Arana-Ward, “Three Marielitos, Three Manifest Destinies,” Washington Post, July 9, 1996. The research continued in follow-up reporting on Carlos’s family for two decades after that.
the Mariel boat lift brought 125,000 Cubans to the United States: Tomas Curi, Immigration and Naturalization Service, telephone interview by author, May 1996.
“Give me your tired, your poor”: Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus,” lines that are engraved on the Statue of Liberty, Poetry Foundation online, accessed February 1, 2019, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46550/the-new-colossus.
“America . . . is the greatest of opportunities”: George Santayana, an often-quoted line from The Last Puritan: A Memoir in the Form of a Novel (London: Constable, 1935).
about 2,500—were convicts and mental cases: Curi, interview.
Epigraph; “Man wasn’t born to live without purpose like a jungle animal”: Editorial, El Mercurio (Chile), May 24, 1859, quoted in Leticia Reina, La reindianización de América, Siglo XIX [The re-Indianization of America, 19th century] (México, DF: XXI Century, 1997), 141.
leaving three thousand men, women, and children to die: Joyce Appleby, Shores of Knowledge (New York: Norton, 2013), 25.
“I saw here cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen”: Las Casas, A Short History, 53–57.
if Catholics were all going to heaven: Appleby, Shores.
whether they killed to eat or ate the already dead: Neil L. Whitehead, “Carib Cannibalism: The Historical Evidence,” Journal de la Société des Américanistes 70, no. 1 (1984): 69–87.
Columbus’s writings reveal that he was very aware: Ibid., 70, 74; Carlos A. Jáuregui, Canibalia: Canibalismo, calibanismo, antropofagia cultural y consumo en América Latina, 62.
The indigenous peoples of Mexico: Whitehead, “Carib Cannibalism,” 71.
“showed all the ferocity and bestiality”: Jáuregui, 62.
“If such cannibals continue to resist and do not admit”: Whitehead, “Carib Cannibalism,” 70.
conquistadors called for a broader definition of the criteria: Ibid., 74.
Sir Walter Raleigh . . . joked: Richard Hakluyt, Hakluyt’s Voyages to the New World (New York: Macmillan, 1972), 396.
a sangre y fuego: The Spanish literal meaning for this is “by blood and fire.” The understanding is “unto extermination.”
“limpieza de sangre”: Albert A. Sicroff, Los Estatutos de Limpieza de Sangre (Madrid: Taurus, 1985).
“Spaniards would brag about their panoply of cruelties”: Las Casas, Historia, vol. 3, bk. 2, sec. 6, ch. 17; Obras, 4:1363.
“All this, and more, I saw, so foreign to human nature”: Las Casas, Historia, Ibid.
ten million Africans who were abducted: “List of Voyages,” Voyages Database, Emory University, accessed February 1, 2019, www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/search; Carson Claiborne, Stanford University, “Blacks in Latin America,” Microsoft Encarta Online Encyclopedia 2000.
the Muslims of Granada had slaughtered its Jews: “Spain Viritual Jewish History Tour,” Jewish Virtual Library, accessed January 31, 2019, www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/spain-virtual-jewish-history-tour: “In 1066 a Muslim mob stormed the royal palace in Granada, crucified Jewish vizier Joseph ibn Naghrela, and massacred most of the Jewish population of the city. Accounts of the Granada Massacre state that more than 1,500 Jewish families, numbering 4,000 persons, were murdered in just one day.” The entire population of Granada was approximately 25,000.
more than a hundred thousand Jews were massacred: Edward Rothstein, “Was the Islam of Old Spain Truly Tolerant?,” New York Times online, September 27, 2003.
Hadn’t medieval lore held that the periphery: This goes back to Pliny the Elder’s first-century AD descriptions of extraordinary races that inhabited India and Ethiopia. See also Alixe Bovey, “Medieval Monsters,” British Library online, last modified April 30, 2015.
For all the contemporary revisionist scholarship that has portrayed: One pair of scholars has gone so far as to say, “Before the whites came, our conflicts were brief and almost bloodless, resembling far more a professional football game than the lethal annihilations of the European conquest.” Russell Means and Marvin Wolf, Where White Men Fear to Tread (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 16. For a sobering corrective, see Richard J. Chacon and Rubén G. Mendoza’s thorough and convincing Latin American Indigenous Warfare and Ritual Violence, which incorporates dozens of years of research in essays covering multidisciplinary studies. Much of what follows in this section is based on the scholarship therein.
The skull towers at Tenochtitlán alone . . . as many as 136,000: Michael Harner, “The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice,” American Ethnologist 4, no. 1 (February 1977): 117–35, www.jstor.org/stable/643526. Others have calculated 60,000 skulls: Bernard R. Ortíz de Montellano, “Counting Skulls: Comment on the Aztec Cannibalism Theory of Harner-Harris,” American Anthropologist 85, no. 2 (1983): 403–6.
M
ontezuma II’s predecessor, Ahuitzotl, conducted a mass execution: Rubén G. Mendoza, “Aztec Militarism and Blood Sacrifice,” in Chacon and Mendoza, 42.
Xipe Totec, ruler of war as well as earthly abundance: Eduardo Matos Moctezuma and Felipe Solis Olguín, Aztecs (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2002), 423.
ritual flaying among the Aztecs: Ibid., 423–26.
The Mayans, no strangers to these practices: Chacon and Mendoza, 15–25.
Before the start of a game: Rubén G. Mendoza, “The Divine Gourd Tree,” in The Taking and Displaying of Human Body Parts as Trophies by Amerindians, ed. Richard Chacon and David Dye (New York: Springer, 2007), 409.
part and parcel of the ritual of worship: There is plenty of evidence of this in the Mayan text of the Popol Vuh, or Book of Counsel.
From the 700 men: Jiménez de Quesada, “One After the Other They All Fell Under Your Majesty’s Rule” (Excerpts from Epitomé del Nuevo Reino de Granada), The Colombia Reader: History, Culture, Politics, ed. Ann Farnsworth-Alvear, Marco Palacíos, and Ana María Gómez López (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 22.
Jiménez de Quesada issued the order to fight, slaughter: Ibid.
steal more than seven thousand emeralds: Ibid.
Epigraph; “It’s not my fault. It’s just my nature.”: A possible adaptation of Aesop’s “The Farmer and the Viper.” Certainly versions have appeared among the Persians, the Central Asians, and other cultures. I have taken it from the fable of the scorpion and the frog in Louis Pérez’s lecture; see below.
the ways that stress, social pressure, and hardship have affected certain races: C. W. Kuzawa and E. Sweet, “Epigenetics and the Embodiment of Race,” American Journal of Human Biology 21, no. 1 (January/February 2009): 2–15. See also the online index of Northwestern University Laboratory for Human Biology Research/Christopher Kuzawa web files, www.groups.anthropology.northwestern.edu/lhbr/kuzawa_web_files/pdfs.
Others conclude that the effects of violence: K. M. Radtke et al., “Transgenerational Impact of Intimate Partner Violence on Methylation in the Promoter of the Glucocorticoid Receptor,” Translational Psychiatry 1, no. 7 (July 2011): e21.